Election Reform Done Right
The most effective Members of Congress are often the ones you never hear about. Meet one.
Ask almost any news-consuming (fake or otherwise) person the name of a Member of Congress who isn’t in leadership. You’ll most likely get a “Watters World” Man-On-The-Street response (a blank stare, a shrug, or laughingly wrong). I won’t name anyone here, but you know.
The least dangerous place is between them and genuine legislative achievement.
Sadly, we rarely read or hear from Members of Congress who not only engage in actual legislating - a congressperson's job - but win little or no new coverage when they make real news.
One such Member of Congress is third-term US Rep. Brian Steil (R-WI), who in 2018 was elected to succeed former House Speaker Paul Ryan from Wisconsin’s farm-and-factory-based First District, ensconced in the Badger State’s southeastern corner, bordering Illinois and Lake Michigan.
Five years later, Rep. Steil chairs a standing committee of the US House, the House Administration Committee, which passed HR 4563, the American Confidence in Elections, or ACE Act, on an 8-4 vote. Committee Democrats, of course, hurled a bevy of amendments, many of them recycled from their infamous and blatantly unconstitutional HR 1, “For The People” Act that federalized elections, outlawed voter ID, outlawed the ability to remove dead and relocated voters six months before election day, and instituted public financing of elections. Republicans turned all aside, save one - “to commission a study to determine whether states could conduct special elections for Congress if members were involved in a mass casualty event,” reported Yahoo!News.
“Divisive Election Bill Advances to House Floor,” screamed the headline. Funny, HR 1 in 2021, which was wildly more “divisive,” earned no such moniker when it passed a Democratic-controlled House.
Chairman Steil followed that up by chairing a field hearing earlier this month at Atlanta’s Georgia State University, where the legislation was endorsed by Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensburger. “Georgia was once again used as a model for national reform," Raffensburger told the Committee last May.
You remember the 2021 Georgia election reform law. Democrats went nuts, persuaded home-grown companies like Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola to condemn the law, and Major League Baseball moved its All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver in protest. The cost to Atlanta’s economy - many small minority-owned businesses - exceeded an estimated $100 million.
In a bit of poetic justice, the Atlanta Braves got the last word. They won the World Series that year. And in 2022, every prediction made by Democrats and their useful corporate idiots about the Georgia law proved wrong. Voter turnout surged, especially among African Americans, and issues that plagued the 2020 election, especially in Atlanta-based Fulton County, did not reappear. Georgians reelected a Democratic US Senator and a Republican governor. Georgia voters didn’t buy the canard that somehow preventing political actors from distributing food and water - along with partisan pitches - to voters waiting in line was “voter suppression.”
It’s not unlike what happened with Florida following the embarrassing 2000 election that resulted in George W. Bush not being declared the presidential election winner until mid-December when the US Supreme Court stepped in to stop shenanigans by the Florida Supreme Court. The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) studied Florida’s changes in a report entitled “Worst to First.” In fairness, many of Georgia's subsequent reforms started with their southern neighbor. After the 2022 election, two-thirds of Florida’s 7.7 million-plus voters voted by absentee or early in person. The last election was called before 9 p.m. on Election Day, not Week, Month, or Season. Here are the eight provisions Florida instituted as a real model for other states.
If Florida can do it, why can’t Pennsylvania or any other state? And what makes the new ACE Act so good?
About a couple of these Florida provisions. Electronic poll books help election workers direct voters to the correct locations to vote, fix errors, and more easily determine if someone has already cast an early vote. Early absentee ballot canvassing works hand in hand with electronic polling and allows early votes to be counted early, expediting and easing the work of counting votes on election night. Electronic polls books do require internet access, so cybersecurity safeguards are essential.
Pennsylvania and other states corrupted their election laws and machinery in 2020 and are yet to recover, led by malevolent state Democratic officials. But even one Republican state is letting mail ballots arrive as much as 13 days after election day. PILF is suing them on Constitutional grounds (the Framers established election day, not season), and if they’re successful, Katy bar the door in other states with similar provisions.
As for the beauty of the ACE Act, the Washington Examiner described it best.
In many respects, the bill is the polar opposite of the one Democrats passed in 2021. It would give donors more privacy in the name of free speech. Democrats, by contrast, pursued transparency to combat the influence of “dark money.”
The differences boil down, in some cases, to a stated desire to protect states' rights. The legislation would express a sense of Congress, for example, that state legislatures should be in charge of redistricting, a process that Democrats wanted to hand over to nonpartisan commissions.
House Republicans argue the federal government should be a partner, not a decision-maker, in the process. They would make federal records available to states, for example, so they can audit and update their voter rolls.
“This bill protects our federalist principles,” Steil told the Washington Examiner in a brief interview on Wednesday. “What it does is it provides states the tools that they need to be able to enhance election integrity, but does not tell states specifically what to do.”
But one doesn’t need to dig deep into the 224-page bill - a grab bag of good ideas found in other GOP election reform bills - to find how the GOP envisions elections should work with a series of reforms focused on the District of Columbia, which falls under the jurisdiction of Congress. Here are a few of those reforms:
Require all voters to present a photo ID to vote in person or to request an absentee/mail ballot. It also requires D.C. to provide voters a free copy of an ID if necessary and include photos of registered voters in the poll books with measures in place to protect privacy.
Require voter roll list maintenance to be conducted annually and a prohibition on same-day registration.
Prohibit ballot harvesting.
Prohibit mailing ballots except upon a voter’s request
Repeal the D.C. Local Resident Voting Rights Act that allows non-citizens to vote.
Prohibit ranked-choice voting.
Require that all ballots except military/overseas be received by the close of polls and that election officials report unofficial results no later than 10:00 a.m. the following day.
Other than beefed-up voter roll maintenance, my favorite provision would eliminate limits on “coordinated expenditures” by official political parties. That’s huge. Right now, the ability of a political party to spend money for their nominees to the US House and Senate is limited by law. Special interests are all too happy to step into the vacuum, making winners more accountable to them, not their party leaders or constituents.
No bill is perfect, and I would like to see the ACE Act fix a gaping hole in the Overseas Uniformed and Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) to strengthen proof of citizenship requirements for non-military people residing overseas. I can live with ranked-choice voting for party primaries or conventions, just not with general elections; I think it violates the 14th Amendment. I would also like states to be incentivized to replace “signature verification” for voting by mail - a very subjective process - with personal identification numbers, as Georgia now requires.
But let’s be real - Democrats aren’t going to let this bill pass the Senate. They will only support legislation that benefits them politically, a power grab, as the misnamed “For The People Act” clearly attests. However, it’s a good start for a new GOP Congress in 2025 with a Republican in the oval office, assuming the GOP doesn’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as they are often wont to do.
Strengthening the ability of political parties to elect candidates will help Congress function better. Many of the errors and shortcomings that befall or plague local election systems result from the complexities being forced by policymakers to expand early and absentee voting, or as some call it, “voting from home,” courtesy of the Vote at Home Institute. And enhancing a state’s ability to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat will restore lost faith in the integrity of our elections, thanks to the excellent work of a Congressperson you likely never heard of before.